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YouTube Is Born
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YouTube.com was officially registered as a
domain
in February of
2005, but Steve, Chad, and Jawed still had a lot of work to do. Every
website costs money to run, and YouTube would not be cheap. Website
owners must pay for the bandwidth that a website uses. Bandwidth is a
measurement of the data transferred from the website to a visitor. Many
websites pay for the bandwidth their website uses by hosting ads. At first,
Steve and his friends did not want to do this.
Steve and his team knew that a video website would require a lot more
space and bandwidth than an image-sharing website, simply because of
the sheer size of the files being shared. “The amount of CPU computa-
tional power it takes to run a service like that is probably the highest out
of any other startup that you can run,” he explained. They would need a
lot more money than other startup companies to get started.
Much of the initial funding for YouTube came from the team’s own
pockets. “It was really rough for a short while,” Steve admitted. He had a
lot of credit card debt when YouTube first began, and since he was charg-
ing everything to his personal credit card, the debt just kept growing.
The immense pressure to turn a profit helped push them forward. “It’s
Make Connections
The cofounders of YouTube knew exactly what website they wanted
to create, but they did not have a name for it yet. They spent time
writing down a bunch of names on a list before choosing the right
one. According to Steve, it was Chad Hurley who came up with
the name and drew the original logo for YouTube: “There was a
list of names on the left side, and he ended up drawing the YouTube logo. There
was sort of this ‘aha!’ moment that just said ‘Okay, that’s it. That’s the logo and
that’s the name we’re going with.’”